Phantom Power

Today on a very special pre-Halloween episode of Phantom Power, we try to make contact with the dead using digital audio technology. We are trying Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) with ITC practitioner Joshua Sean and cultural scholar Leila Taylor, who focuses on the esoteric, horror, and the occult. Join us, if you dare…. 

Joshua Sean is the owner and founder of Zero-G ITC, an organization dedicated to Instrumental Trans-Communication Engineering Research and Development, Theory and Design. Joshua is an audio scientist and engineer and the inventor of PRISM, an analog emulation system that utilizes quantum dynamics and chaotic light photon interactions to isolate communication anomalies. You can find his ITC livestreams at YouTube.

Leila Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer, speaker, and designer whose work focuses on the intersection of history, horror and the gothic in contemporary culture. Leila is author of Sick Houses: Haunted Homes & the Architecture of Dread and Darkly: Black History & America’s Gothic Soul. Her work has appeared in outlets like the New York Review of Architecture, Lapham’s Quarterly, and Repeater Book of the Occult. She’s given talks on the eerie and the esoteric for the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, Morbid Anatomy, The Collective for Radical Death Studies, and The Occult Humanities Conference. By day, she is Creative Director for Brooklyn Public Library. 

Cited Media:

Books:

Leigh Eric Schmidt - Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (2000)

Leila Taylor - Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread (2025)

Leila Taylor - Darkly: Black History and America's Gothic Soul (2019)

Tariq Goddard & Eugene Thacker - The Repeater Book of the Occult: Tales from the Darkside (2021)

Friedrich Jürgenson - Voices From Space (1964)

Konstantin Raudive - Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead (1971)

Emanuel Swedenborg - The Animal Kingdom (Regnum Animale) (1745)

Audio:

Konstantin Raudive - Breakthrough (1971)

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville - Au Clair de la Lune (1860)

Film:

Daniel Drasin - Calling Earth (2018)

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
7:10 Defining ITC
15:03 Early Sound Recording
20:26 Jürgenson & Raudive
30:28 Raudive's Three Methods
33:51 The Prism System
38:29 Live ITC Demonstration
46:54 Listening & Wrap-Up

Click here to read the full transcript

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Theodore Gordon is a musician, musicologist, and scholar of science and technologies studies. He’s interested in the mystery of the black box of audio technology. We know that there are inputs and outputs in this now ubiquitous music technology, but whatever happens in between remains mysterious and unseen.

In this episode Ted and I explore how this black box has allowed musicians to imagine synths in revolutionary ways, by discussing three visionary musicians who had very different ideas about technology in the 1960s and '70s: Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, and Sun Ra.

In Phantom Power news, we have just released a new free digital zine! It's called Nothing is Background: Experimental Artists and Thinkers on Sound, Attention, and the Resonant World.

It features portraits of 16 guests from past Phantom Power episodes who have shared their ideas an inspirations exclusively for this zine. Whether you’re a musician, sound scholar, or casual listener, I think you'll find a lot of inspiration here to deepen your sensory contact with the world in this era of digital discontent.

Subscribers will have already received an email link to download the zine for free, and if you are yet to subscribe, and want to get your hands on a copy, you can pick it up for free Nothing Is Background.

And finally, in celebration of the release of Nothing is Background and Phantom Power at Talk Low Festival, we are hosting a limited time giveaway of a hat and shirt of your choosing from our fantastic merch line on the Phantom Power store!

You must be subscribed at any level, free or paid, by October the 31st to be automatically entered to win, so if you aren’t already, you can subscribe to Phantom Power here.

Cited Media:

Music:

Lejaren Hiller & Leonard Isaacson - Illiac Suite (1957)

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Gesang der Jünglinge (1956)

Morton Subotnick - Silver Apples of the Moon (1967)

David Behrman - New Sounds in Electronic Music (1967)

Wendy Carlos - Switched-On Bach (1968)

Roland Kayn - Cybernetics (1969)

Gershon Kingsley - Popcorn (1969)

Hot Butter - Popcorn (1972)

Sun Ra - Atlantis (1969)

Sun Ra - My Brother the Wind (1970)

Sun Ra - Nuits de la Fondation Maeght / The Cosmic Explorer (1971)

Pauline Oliveros - Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1961–1970 (2012)

Books:

Theodore Gordon - The Composer's Black Box (2025)

Norbert Wiener - Cybernetics (1948)

Thomas Patteson - Instruments for New Music (2015)

Louis Chude-Sokei - The Sound of Culture (2015)

Andrew Pickering - The Mangle of Practice (1995)

Sun Ra - The Immeasurable Equation (1972)

Abraham Moles - Théorie de l'information et perception esthétique (1966)

Articles & Papers:

Claude Shannon - A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948)

Harald Bode - A New Tool for the Exploration of Unknown Electronic Music Instrument Performances (1961)

Film:

Sun Ra - Space is the Place (1974)

Chapters:

0:00 Intro

2:28 Phantom Power News

6:34 The Composer's Black Box

16:24 The Tape Music Center & Buchla's Box

29:35 Pauline Oliveros: Attention & Sensation

39:08 Sun Ra: The Illegible Instrument

47:03 The Cosmic Explorer

51:25 Outro

Click here to read the full transcript

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Best known as Geologist, Animal Collective’s Brian Weitz injects synthesizers, samples, animal sounds, and field recordings into that band's enchantingly strange sound world. Recently, Weitz has been on a creative tear, releasing a solo album and several other projects, including Croz Boyce with Avey Tare. In our interview, he talks about sonic texture, the internet’s influence on music culture, and his obsession with the hand-cranked medieval instrument, the hurdy-gurdy.

In this conversation, we talk about sound, technology, and the music business: the first sounds that caught Brian's young ear; his love of that classic turn of the millennium technology the MiniDisc player; Animal Collective’s determination never to sound too “trad”; the strange opportunities and pressures of early internet fame; And the hurdy-gurdy--that infernal machine that fuels so much of Brian's recent creativity.

Phantom Power members will get the full interview, including Brian’s background in ocean conservation—we talk about scuba diving the recordings of seals and walruses that found their way into Animal Collective tracks. Plus Brian's reading and listening recommendations. You can become a member at mackhagood.com .

And Croz Boyce will perform at Cincinnati’s Talk Low Music Festival on Saturday, September 26, at the Contemporary Arts Center. Phantom Power is proud to sponsor Talk Low, and I hope to see some of you there.

Cited Media:

Albums:

Michael Jackson - Thriller (1982)

Panda Bear - Panda Bear (1999)

Animal Collective - Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished (2000)

The Strokes - Is This It (2001)

Animal Collective - Campfire Songs (2003)

Animal Collective - Sung Tongs (2004)

Animal Collective - Feels (2005)

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009)

Animal Collective - Meeting of the Waters (2017)

Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises (2021)

Randall Poster - For the Birds: The Birdsong Project (benefiting Audubon Society & Macaulay Library, Cornell) (2022)

Motherfuckers, JMB & Co (2025)

Geologist - Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights (2026)

Avey Tare & Geologist present Croz Boyce - Croz Boyce (2026)

Climax Golden Twins - Imperial Household Orchestra

David Crosby - If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971)

Valentin Clastrier - solo hurdy-gurdy record

New Psychoactives - Animal Collective side project (SoundCloud)

Series & Platforms:

Daryl Hall - Live at Daryl's House (web series)

Fugazi - Live Archive Series

Artists:

Crosby, Stills & Nash

Sonic Youth

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
5:15 Early Musical Memories
12:27 New York Scene & Early Records
16:05 Band Philosophy & Internet Era
22:00 Music Business & Fan Community
27:40 Croz Boyce & Recent Work
31:58 Naming Croz Boyce
36:48 The Hurdy-Gurdy
41:17 College Radio & Keiji Haino
47:32 Outro

Click here to read the full transcript

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In the early 2010s self-taught guitarist Tashi Dorji was recording improvised guitar explorations in his home near Asheville, North Carolina. These self-released outings drew on his unique mix of musical influences from the Buddhist music of his childhood in Bhutan to the Western music he discovered through shortwave radio and bootleg tapes of MTV videos.

Subsequently inspired by punk rock as well as the outsider guitar styles of John Fahey, Derek Bailey, Mark Ribot, and Sir Richard Bishop, Tashi was developing a percussively rhythmic sound all his own. Guitarist Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance was so inspired by Tashi Dorji's playing that he started a record label to release Tashi’s self-titled vinyl debut in 2014.

Since then, Tashi's released records on Drag City, collaborated with musicians like John Dieterich of Deerhoof and Tony Buck of the Necks, and toured with Godspeed, You! Black Emperor.

Tashi is going to be coming to Cincinnati to take part in the Talk Low Music Festival, which is running September 24th through 27th. He'll be performing with Faith Coloccia on Saturday, September 26th. Phantom Power is a sponsor of the Talk Low Festival, which features a great lineup of adventurous music link in the show notes. So I thought this would be a great opportunity to talk improvised music with someone who has dedicated his life to it.

Tashi has developed a philosophy of improvisation that challenges ideas of permanence, hierarchy, and value. We discuss the radical openness of improv in life and music and we talk about the record that opened his ears to open tunings, as well as how a condenser microphone and a pair of headphones changed his relationship to the guitar. We also discuss his early life in Bhutan, that tiny country located in the Eastern Himalayas between China and India.

Of course our members will get an extended version of the conversation, including Tashi's recommendations of things to read, listen to and do more information at http://mackhagood.com .

Visit Tashi Dorji’s Bandcamp.

Cited Media:

Albums & Records:

Tashi Dorji - Blue Twelve (2014)

Tashi Dorji - We Will Be Wherever the Fires Are Lit (2024)

Tashi Dorji - Low Clouds Hang, This Land Is On Fire (2026)

Ry Cooder & Vishwa Mohan Bhatt - A Meeting by the River (1993)

Joe Pass - Virtuoso (1974)

Nirvana - Nevermind (1991)

Neil Young - Heart of Gold (1972)

Raphael Rogiński - Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes (2024)

Miles Davis

Sun City Girls

75 Dollar Bill

Pavement

Bonnie “Prince” Billy

Tesla

Cinderella

Metallica

Slayer

Jon Bon Jov

Soundgarden

Alice In Chains

Butthole Surfers

Smashing Pumpkins

Midnight Oil

Michael Jackson

Books:

Dan DiPiero - Book on Improvising in Everyday Life
Laozi - Tao Te Ching (~6th Century BCE)
Emma Goldman
Alexander Berkman

Articles & Interviews:

Andy Slater - On Visual Impairment and Sound Art
Vijay Iyer - Writings on Improvisation
Mark Masters - Retrospective on Tashi Dorji

Chapters:

0:00 Intro & Welcome
3:00 Guitar Influences & Touring
5:00 Recording & Sound Discovery
10:00 Patterns & Prepared Guitar
16:00 Philosophy of Improvisation
21:00 Collaborating with Others
24:00 Musical Origins in Bhutan
29:00 Shortwave Radio & Western Rock
34:00 Leaving Bhutan for America
43:00 Buddhism & Recent Work
49:33 Outro

To read the full transcript click here.

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Siavash Amini is an experimental composer living in Tehran, trying to live his life and hone his craft amid United States bombings and government crackdowns. Amazingly, he is still creating. August 28th will see release of his collaboration with the American theorist and poet Eugene Thacker, Songs for Sad Poets Vol. III (Hallow Ground). He’ll also soon drop a solo record, Beneath the Pine on Lawrence English's Room 40 label.

In this conversation, we talk about the war, Siavash's daily life, and what he'd like to ask of people on the left in the United States and Israel. We also dive into his two albums and his text-based composition techniques. For the full unedited conversation, become a member at mackhagood.com.

Finally, please consider joining Siavash's Patreon page. It's the best way that you can support a great artist going through the unimaginable.

Cited Media:

Music:

Mazen Kerbaj - Starry Night (2006)

Albums:

Siavash Amini & Eugene Thacker - Songs for Sad Poets, Vol. 1 & 2 (2022)

Siavash Amini & Eugene Thacker - Songs for Sad Poets, Vol. 3 (2025)

Siavash Amini - There Beneath the Pine (UNRELEASED)

Literature:

Sadegh Hedayat - Three Drops of Blood (1932)

Sadegh Hedayat - Buried Alive (1930)

Theorists/Writers:

Eugene Thacker - In the Dust of This Planet (2011)

Matt Finney

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
3:49 Daily Life in Tehran
7:58 Western Indifference
11:56 Art Under Fire
13:26 New Records
21:28 There Beneath the Pine
23:54 Persian Music Influence
26:47 Collaborating with Eugene Thacker
28:48 Songs for Sad Poets Origins
32:57 UTAU Vocals Technique
40:11 Nation States & Dialogue
47:36 Still Making Music

To read the full transcript click here.

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While Mack takes a summer break, we bring you this treat from the archives: the full-members-only version of his 2024 interview with beloved audiobook narrator Robin Miles. This episode features almost an hour of additional content, including our What’s Good segment where Robin unsurprisingly makes some really great book recommendations! To get access to all our members’ content, past and future, become a member at mackhagood.com.

This episode is a masterclass in audiobook narration and acting with an acclaimed actor, casting director, audiobook narrator and audiobook director. Miles has narrated over 500 audiobooks, collecting numerous industry awards and, in 2017, was added to the Audible Narrator Hall of Fame. She’s the most recognizable voice in literary Afrofuturism, having interpreted books by Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemisin, and Nnedi Okorafor. 

Miles holds a BA and an MFA from Yale. She has taught young actors and narrators at conservatories across the country and she has an amazing talent for doing accents—something we really dig deep into on this podcast. In this conversation we talk about technique, the audiobook industry, and the politics of vocal representation. How do we avoid the misrepresentation of marginalized people on the one hand and vocal typecasting on the other?

Cited Media:

Books:

Plays:

0:00 Intro & preamble
4:51 Guest intro: Robin Miles
11:03 Teaching acting
17:00 Script marking technique
20:48 Character switching & IPA
24:08 The IPA explained
25:19 Vocal colors & authorship
27:53 Physical embodiment of text
35:54 Nalo Hopkinson deep dive
40:56 Roles in audiobook production
51:44 Broken Earth & sci-fi voicing
1:12:09 Politics of representation
1:16:33 Recording gear & software
1:19:44 AI vs. human narration
1:30:08 Writing & narrator matching
1:45:16 What's Good

Click here to read the full transcript

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While Mack takes a summer break, we bring you this treat from the archives: the full-members-only version of his 2024 interview with the influential theorist of noise and affect theory, Dr. Marie Thompson. This episode features 40 minutes of additional content on Thompson’s research on tinnitus and hearing loss. To get access to all our members’ content, past and future, become a member at mackhagood.com. 

Feminist sound scholar and musician Marie Thompson is a theorist of noise. She has also been one of the key thinkers in integrating the study of sound with the study of affect. 

Noise is a notorious concept that means different things different people. In this conversation, Marie Thompson examines noise through the affect theory of Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza as well as the systems theory of Michel Serres. We’ll also talk about her critique of acoustic ecology and a rather public debate she had with sound scholar Christoph Cox. And if you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry—we break it down!

Dr. Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at the Open University in the UK. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). She has developed Open University courses on topics such as Dolly Parton and Dub sound systems.

Cited Media:

Books:

Articles / Journal Pieces:

Journals:

Chapters:

0:21 Intro
5:17 Introducing Marie Thompson
7:57 Liverpool music roots
10:38 PhD at Newcastle
14:55 Defining noise
20:38 Spinoza & affect
39:44 Materialism debate with Cox
47:57 Tinnitus
1:09:04 Tinnitus & ableism in sound studies
1:13:11 Normate listening
1:23:57 Closing thoughts
1:24:22 What's Good segment

To read the full transcript click here

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Today we talk radio, podcasting, and democracy with Jason Loviglio. Jason is an expert on the history of National Public Radio and a key theorist of how audio media have changed the public sphere. He traces the politics of radio down to the smallest details, like the kinds of mics that are used, the way radio personalities use their voices, even the fan mail that comes in.

In this episode, Jason Loviglio discusses everything from FDR's fireside chats to the politics of NPR to his new book, Empathy Machines: This American Life, Podcasting and the Public Radio Structure of Feeling, the first full-length book on This American Life. He argues that TAL was designed from the start to function as an empathy machine, but over the years, the politics of that empathy have changed substantially.

Jason Loviglio is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Jason is the author of Radio's Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass Mediated Democracy. He's the co-editor of Radio Journal and he has edited three different volumes on radio.

Cited Media:

Books:

Podcasts / Radio Programs:

Essays / Speeches:

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
5:15 Intimate Public
10:35 FDR's Radio Voice
17:00 Radio & Affect
27:41 NPR's Origins
39:31 This American Life
44:40 Ira Glass's Formula
52:59 Empathy & Its Limits
1:02:27 Podcast Explosion

To read the full transcript click here.

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Today we’re doing one of our occasional episodes where host Mack Hagood talks about a new essay he’s written for our newsletter “Feed Logic and the Failure to Thrive” Mack writes that students and professors are struggling, both academically and spiritually. He tries to diagnose the issue he felt in his classrooms this year and the role technology may play in it.

For new listeners, Mack is a writer and researcher who studies sound, technology, and culture. He is the author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control, a book on noise-canceling headphones, white noise, tinnitus, and the ways people use sound to manage modern life. He is currently writing a new book for Penguin Press, and he also hosts this podcast Phantom Power, where he interviews artists, scholars, musicians, and sound designers about the invisible power of sound in everyday life. Besides all that, Mack is a university professor and that’s what his most recent essay is about.

Click here to read the newsletter for free.

Cited Media:

Film:
Mary Bronstein - If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025)

Books:
Ben Lerner - Transcription (2026)
Mack Hagood - Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (2019)
Hartmut Rosa - Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (2019)

Newsletter/Essay:
Mack Hagood - Feed Logic and the Failure to Thrive (2025)

Lecture:
Amar Bose - MIT Lecture on Engineering

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
1:58 The Essay & Its Response
3:13 ARFID as Metaphor
8:38 University Pressures & AI
9:50 Student Disengagement
14:05 Feed Logic & Screen Time
16:30 Ultra-Processed Communication
29:50 Student Doubleness & Motivation
36:05 Resonance vs. Control

To read the full transcript click here

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Today  we talk to modular synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani and MIT Spatial Sound Lab researcher KamranV. Suzanne and Kamran both love quadraphonic sound, and they have a new quad release coming out on June 4th called Ciani/Orkest. They are on a mission to make quadraphonic music accessible to both musicians and to listeners, and in this interview, Kamran will explain how, you, with no special equipment, can listen to their new album in quad.

We'll also get into how analog synthesizers actually work, the early history of Buchla synths versus Moog synths, why Suzanne thinks keyboards diminish the potential of synths, and how Suzanne designed some of the most recognizable sounds of the 1980s.

Suzanne Ciani is a Grammy Award nominated composer, electronic musician, and neoclassical recording artist who has released over 20 solo albums, including Seven Waves and The Velocity of Love. Her work has been featured in Hollywood films, video games, and countless commercials. She was inducted into the first class of keyboard magazine's Hall of Fame, alongside Bob Moog, Don Buchla, and Dave Smith. And she was the subject of the feature documentary, A Life in Waves.

KamranV is an arts technologist and MIT Spatial Sound Lab researcher, and he's a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient. He's worked at Interscope Records, produced immersive music releases for Nine Inch Nails, Sting, and Beck, and he ran the music tech fest, Moogfest. He's also on the board of dublab.

Cited Media:

Music & Albums:

Film & TV:

Events & Festivals:

Tools & Plugins:

Record Labels & Archives:

Chapters:

0:00 Intro
5:45 Meet the Guests
6:28 Sound Design & Commercials
13:45 High Art vs Low Culture
19:03 Ciani Orkest
24:42 Moog vs Buchla
26:36 How Modular Synths Work
36:15 Quadrophonic Sound
45:13 The QUARK Plugin
50:24 Seven Waves

Click here to read the full transcript

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